The Bookstore Book Group
A Cautionary Tale of Woe
Book groups run by book stores are not what you want. Trust me on this. I know whereof I speak, and yes as a matter of fact I am still bitter.
Don't be fooled by promising appearances. You will not make a sparkling new group of book buddies at one of these places, including perhaps that special someone with whom you will be exchanging volumes of love poetry on your golden anniversary. Yes, it's true that people do meet and fall in love and even marry over books. It happened to a friend of mine. They've been together something like ten years now, and are very happy. But first of all, she's one of those women who has that special Nicole-Kidman something about the arch of her eyebrow, so that it seemed only natural that a rich, gorgeous, artistic, witty British guy would sit right down and chat her up about the book she was reading; secondly, it wasn't in a bookstore or at a book group or anywhere else where she had gone in some hope of being noticed, it was at a park where she was sitting and reading because she damned well felt like it because she really liked reading, and the guy was utterly bewitched by the fact that there was this perfectly pretty girl sitting there perfectly indifferent to everything but the book in front of her; and third and most important, it already happened to someone I know, which means that since the odds of such a thing happening even once are already breathtakingly bad, we can all sit back and relax in the knowledge that my friend ruined it for the rest of us because there's no effing way that such a thing could happen twice in this hemisphere while this particular sun is shining in the sky. So give it up, already.
What was I on about? Right. Book store book groups. A match made in hell. The last one I went to consisted of:
1. The leader, who was an employee of the bookstore and who therefore had to get back to work at a certain time. The meeting couldn't come to a natural end with a mediator like that. You could hear the clock ticking, and any discussion that did manage to get underway was usually cut short by a clerk with a question about a shift change or a book order.
2. An American woman who had taken an advanced degree in literature in England. As she knew everything there was to know about everything that had ever been written by anyone ever ever (shut up, I am not bitter), she saw it as her moral duty to butt in every time anyone else said something, even when the mediator gave us each a turn to say, alone, what we thought of the book. Apparently taking a high enough degree at a well-known enough university means being above little things like letting other people talk just because it's their turn. (Okay, now I'm a little bitter.)
3. An old woman who knew nothing about the book but had seen the ad for the group and thought she'd pop by to see what it was like. After shyly explaining her ignorance, she kept a modest silence for the duration of the meeting. Her wish not to interfere or take valuable time away from those who might have something better to contribute was ethically admirable, but didn't exactly keep things rocking and rolling.
4. Two young women who knew nothing about the book but had heard about the group and thought they'd pop by after work to see what it was like. Their contribution to the discussion consisted of their frequently-announced regret that they hadn't had time to read the book, since it sounded really, really good.
5. A young man who had read the book and thought he'd pop by after work to see what the group was like. He started out reasonably animated, but between the constant interruptions of the omniscient one and the warm glances of the girls still in their office high heels, he had subsided by the end of the evening into a rueful silence.
6. An old man who wandered in two-thirds of the way through the meeting. He hadn't read the book and hadn't heard about the meeting, but he saw us gathered together talking and had nothing better to do than to join us, and wasn't about to let his ignorance of the title in question keep him from dominating the discussion until the mediator mercifully called the meeting to an end.
Walking home that night, all my questions about the book (The Man Who Was Thursday
So don't take the chance. Make your own group or join one made by someone who isn't trying to sell you something (and who can't keep anyone out, for fear of alienating a potential customer). Save your trips to those chain bookstores for when you need a cup of coffee or a DVD.
(Okay, the DVD dig is another piece of bitterness. The book group meeting I just mentioned wasn't the first one I'd gone to at that bookstore. It was the second and the last. At the first one, I made the mistake of mentioning that I was reading Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife. "Oh, that was a wonderful movie!" one woman exclaimed, and the rest of them were off on the various merits or failings of the actors in the PBS special. There is nothing wrong with movies made from books -- well, all right, there's almost always something wrong with them, but never mind that. The point is that at the damned bookstore, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books, at the mention of a book, the members of the book group started talking about the movie based on the book as if it were the book, and I'm sorry but there is something wrong with that. And yes I am still bitter. Thank you for noticing.)
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